USB Floppy Drive not working in Win7 Ultimate x64

$500...holy cow. I'm not really surprised though, since I didn't think ISA-to-PCI adapters even existed...those two interfaces are really different (data paths, clock frequency, everything) so it makes sense that an adapter would have to be pretty complex.

I'd prefer a purple sky over the foggy soup we're having out here right now, lol...and thanks for the kind words :) but you're doing pretty good yourself, always being a nice and helpful chap. Keep up the good work :)

Corazon said:

Well, I have a surprise for you :) The red floppy disk in your photo really is a DD 720KB disk, not a 1.44MB one. Now I wonder if the issue is actually reversed: trying to format a 720KB as 1.44MB = obvious failure.

You can tell by the holes at the corners opposite the metal slider. There's only one, which is the write protection. HD disks have another hole (without a slider to open/close the hole) on the other side identifying them as 1.44MB.

Regarding Daemon Tools showing up in Disk Management, well, that would be a true emulation of a physical drive vs. a simple logical drive - it just depends on how the device driver is implementing it, could be either one. But it's safe to say it really makes no difference in regard to the USB floppy working or not, so no worries there.

Try to format the floppy as 720K (must be specified as a commandline option with format). Does that work?

BTW, badger, I didn't see you mentioning an ISA-to-PCI adapter at first...did you edit your post after I replied, or was I just blind? (lol) :)

Wow I totally did not know that. Now I feel like a noob lol. I tried formatting at 720K (In cmd: format a: /f:720) and it said "Parameters not supported by drive.". Can't say I've seen that error before!

Zepher said:

We had new carpet put in upstairs and as I was moving my computer stuff out of the room, I found a box of floppy's and wanted to see what was on them, just had "pics" written on it.
Grabbed my NEC USB Floppy drive, plugged it into my Win 7 Ultimate 64bit machine, put the floppy in the drive and viewed the files with no issues.

Just tested it again and it still works.
It doesn't show up in Disk Management.

Model I have is NEC UF0002

That's awesome!
Would you be able to grab your sfloppy.sys file and upload it on here for me?
It should be in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers.

I'll try the x86 xp one and yours tomorrow and see if I have any luck.

Hmm, so the format refuses to format to 720KB. The error message does sound like it's the drive itself being incapable of dealing with 720KB disks. I've never heard of a floppy that couldn't handle both densities, but then stranger things have happened.

So...next step: actually finding a HD floppy disk and testing with it. They can still be found in some stores, or maybe a friend or even a nearby office can lend you one.